The White Cross (54 page)

‘When Bishop Walter wanted me to fight at Joppa, I refused, and told him no one on this earth could make me do it.’

I spoke before I thought, which isn’t too unusual, just as the rams completed their third circle of inspection, head to tail. ‘I suppose it might have helped a bit that I was drunk,’ I thought it fair to add, as the rams backed away from one another for a charge.

‘And how did he react, His Grace the Bishop?’

‘He said that as a soldier I’d no choice but to obey.’

CHOK! The bony skulls met with a sound like an axe chopping wood, which echoed through the mountains.

‘But I wouldn’t listen to him. Said I knew that I was trained to kill, but couldn’t. Never would again.’

The rams backed off and charged again. And then again. With shorter runs each time but almost equal force. By then the heads of both were slippery with blood, which when they next met, deflected one beast down onto his knees and slid the other over him to land across his haunch.

But that was not the end of it. Like duellists who fought by plaisance rules, they gave each other space to rise. Then charged again.

CHOK! CHOK! CHOK! They butted heads, and fell and rose another dozen times or more. Before one of them showed simply that he’d had enough, and ambled off to leave the victor in possession of his ewes.

I realised while I watched them that the Bérgé was still speaking. ‘… wounds seldom serious, despite the blood,’ I heard him say ‘…skulls hard as rock. They only fight each other long enough to show who’s fittest to father the next crop of new lambs.’

He turned to look me in the face. ‘D’ye see it’s not the fighting that’s important.’

‘What then?’

‘It is the reason why they fight. These fellows battle to create lives rather than destroy them. And if you think about it, the creation of our own kind is what we’re all of us about.’

As we looked on, the winning ram lifted his bloody head and wrinkled his white nose to snuffle at the ewe whose scent had launched him into combat in the first place. But when he mounted her, she simply went on chewing calmly, staring absent-mindedly into the distance, as if the frantic pounding motion at her rear had nothing much to do with anything that mattered.

The sight was comical and made us laugh.

‘Are we so different in the end? I think not.’ The Bérgé answered his own question. ‘If you’d lived with sheep as long as I have, and with dogs, and watched the marmoté
sporting every summer since you were a boy, then you would see yourself as I do, Garon – not as a lord of creation, but as a child of nature with no greater claim than any other creature to the gift of life.’

‘If you are spared to see more summers, will you eventually acquire a few more grains of sense do we suppose?’ A cool voice intruding from another time. Sir Hugh’s.

We came upon the marmoté
four weeks later up near the melting snowline – fat little brindled people near the size of coneys. Once they’d recalled that sheep and shepherds posed no kind of threat, the creatures totally ignored us, biting off the mountain herbs beneath the very noses of the ewes and sitting up to nibble them with plump backs confidently turned. Their little dark-furred pups played heedlessly amongst the crocus flowers of the high alp – rolling, squeaking, chasing one another round the grazing sheep. Until a high-pitched whistle from an adult perched up on a cairn of stones, warned of a circling eagle. To send them scuttling for the safety of their burrows in the rocks.

‘See to him, Barbon!’ the Bérgé called out sharply to his dog, who stood with hackles raised and sent a volley of short barks into the sky. The sheep lifted their heads. The eagle gave his own thin cry, flapped languidly, rose higher, disappeared. The dog glanced at his master with his ginger eyebrows cocked. Then, seeing nothing more was needed, gave a silent yawn and padded back to roll onto his side against the Bérgé’s rawhide boot.

‘Takes dogs a longish time to learn what patience is. But not so long as men.’

The Flockmaster waited for his sheep to return to grazing and the marmoté to reappear, before continuing. ‘So here’s the recipe for alpine life,’ he offered with a smile. ‘A pinch or two of tolerance, a dash of danger for excitement, and a big measure of cooperation to bind the thing together. How different would you say their taste is to our own?’

‘The difference is that they’re unthinking creatures, and we are men with laws and understanding!’

I shocked the sheep with that. Shocked the marmoté, who shot back into their burrows. Shocked myself, to hear my own voice echo through the peaks – and even shocked old Barbon, who studied me from where he lay for signs of lunacy. Only the Bérgé seemed unconcerned.

‘Ah yes, the curse and the dilemma of mankind, our understanding. I see you think of us as some kind of a hybrid – half beast and half immortal – man as a piece of work incapable of simple living, famed for his intellect and yet more restless and dissatisfied than any other creature. You think men have to understand life’s deeper meanings to find their own way to achievement and success?’

‘I thought I knew the way to find success. But I was wrong,’ I said pathetically. ‘You say that sheep and other animals know how to live as well as you or I. My problem is that I know only what I’m not, and what I haven’t done – not what I am, or what I ought to do.’

The Bérgé exchanged a look with his old dog, which if I’d not known better, I would have have sworn was one of mutual pity. ‘What you are is a young man with a deal of life ahead, who is no different to so many others in his need to question what he has been taught.’

‘So do you think a man can change?’

‘Not in his essential nature, but in the way he sees himself perhaps?’

‘So tell me what I ought to do.’

‘You’ve climbed these mountains for a reason. And since you ask, I’d recommend you make another climb through your own memories, your history if you like. Climb that long path, and then look back to see if you can’t learn from your mistakes.’

‘As a kind of test? Is that what you’re suggesting?’

‘Yes, if you will. But for your benefit, not mine.’

‘You’re telling me to think back through my life – rake through the ashes of my past mistakes?’

He smiled. ‘The image is too sterile. What I’m inviting you to do is to see your life another way. If you can, to hold your actions to the light, see how they have changed the way you feel – the way you are – the way you wish to be. See through them to your future.’

‘Every day muhibb, a page of story.’ That’s how Khadija put it in her moonlit garden. ‘Yesterday is flown, tomorrow Allah’s is to order.’

Uncannily the Bérgé’s next words answered the unspoken thought. (How could he do that? See inside me, read my thoughts?)

‘No, your tomorrow, not Allah’s, Garon,’ he said quietly. ‘This is YOUR time, no one else’s.’

I felt his eyes on mine. ‘Then in the morning you can tell us all that you’ve discovered,’ he suggested.

So that night – last night. Was it really only last night? I did as I was bidden.

After we had driven the last ewe into the cort we’d made two nights before. When all the fires were lit. When I had filled my belly with roast kid, and then made room for its digestion in a smelly squat behind a boulder on the fringes of the camp. When that was done, I left the Bérgé and Léonie and the others to their rest, and climbed up to the place I’ve chosen – this place on the higher slope. To sit in comfort with my back against a rock. My head above the clouds, the world beneath my feet – to watch the sunset stain the snow that clothes the highest peaks.

I saw it only hours ago. That’s how I can recall it so exactly. The breeze was cool and smelled of ice. The valley had become a sea of mist with pine trees spiking through it like the masts of ships, inviting me to walk where I could not. A single glowing cloud clung to the slope like a lost sheep. Until that too was lost in shadow.

The soft bell-music from the fold sings to the moon, brings out the stars. The sound of the sheep bells, the distant view of moon and stars. They lifted me from my high perch still higher to the heavens, attached to earth by nothing but a handspan. Out of time. Adrift from the world of men to which I must eventually return.

Sitting with my back against the rock, hands clasping knees. Imagining the shadowed plain beneath its pall of mist – imagining a chequerboard of fields and waterways – and wattle pens, filled in the place of sheep with the mistakes and triumphs of my life; the ghosts of everyone I’ve known who’s lived and died.

Memories of past experience like saint’s bones in a reliquary – seen looking back and looking down.

CHAPTER FIVE

Some things stand out as clear as day. Others fade completely, or possibly were never very vivid in the first place? I wish I could remember everything about my first meeting with Elise. But oddly it’s the hardest thing to call to mind when I look back. Since then I’ve taxed my brain until it aches to find a memory that I can trust, and failed completely. The more I try the more it seems to slip away. Which isn’t a good start for all of this.

As I look down from heaven on the story of my life and try to work out where it all went wrong, I think perhaps that I should start with what my father said when I was seven. Or come to it as quickly as I can.

Or should I start with guilt? Because when I look down on the world I used to share with her, to see myself as I was when I first met Elise – I am ashamed, no other word for it. I was so set on doing what I thought right. But where was judgement? Was it my fault I was such a self-regarding fool?

It takes an effort to remember what was in your mind when you have changed it since. But when I try to make some sense of what I was and how I acted, I see that I was fated from the cradle to become a soldier.

‘You have to be the strongest man. D’ye hear me, Garon? The bravest and the best. It is expected of you even by the peasants.’

‘But how?’ my childish treble, ‘How must I do it, Father?’

‘We’ll send you to the sergeantry at Lewes to be trained, my boy, that’s how. A knight who isn’t skilled in arms can count for nothing in this world, remember that. It is your destiny to fight.’

My father died soon afterwards, before he’d time to teach me any of his skills, before I’d time to know him. I only know that from that day his words rang in my memory like verses from a chanson: ‘A knight who isn’t skilled in arms can count for nothing in this world, remember that. It is your destiny to fight. You have to be the strongest man. Do you hear me, Garon. The bravest and the best. It is expected of you, even by the peasants.’

Was I more real then in the body of that child than I am here and now? It hardly seems so from this distance and this height above the world, and yet I have to try to understand the difference… And yes, I see it now, the things that came to count with me when I’d put Haddertun behind me were the approval of my peers and my dead father.

Haddertun.
Why wasn’t it enough? Why couldn’t I have understood that men do best in every way when they are left to work and bring some order to a limited existence? To make a gift to life of all they have to offer? I knew it later in Khadija’s house and in the olive groves, have found it with the Bérgé. But back then at Haddertun contentment on so small a scale was not a thing I valued. Back then I was a fool!

Up here beyond the toils of man, I shake my head but cannot change my foolish past. Though what if I could change the tongue-tied bridegroom of that night to what I have become in this place here and now? Given all that’s happened since and given one more chance, could I do better with Elise?

At no time is a man more totally a man, I truly now believe, than when he feels compelled to be joined to a woman.

All right, I mustn’t wallow in all this. Not here. How can it help? It can’t be what the Bérgé can have meant by learning from my past mistakes.

Where am I in their catalogue? I need to have it clear.

She said it took more courage to stand out against men’s expectations than to prove myself a hero. But did I ever understand Elise, know her at all?

When I try to think of how I felt to see her, set-faced standing in the gateway, all I can feel is what I’m feeling now.

It’s not as if her hands had been bound like Khadija’s. She could have waved,
she
wasn’t bound.

Why did they have to bind their hands?

We thought to be a part of that great enterprise, to make a gift to it of everything we had to offer, was all we wanted in the world. Our former lives all purposeless and petty.

Up here in Heaven I’ve become a god, poking at an anthill with a stick. Khadija told me once that she believed each mortal had their own star, which shone the moment they were born and darkened with their final breath. Maybe I saw her star one breathless night from the poop deck of the tarida? But if I did, it isn’t in this sky.

Considering where this is taking me, I’m loathe to turn the page and see the next illumination. That’s what I do. I dodge unpleasant truths. It’s what I’ve always done but can no longer get away with.

Yet when I entered her and saw Khadija’s eyes beneath me blacker than the blackest pool, and heard her moan, and felt the hunger of her mermaid’s clasp. And when I dived and dived again with her into the tropic fathoms, then I remembered how Elise had been with me and how I’d been with her the second time we bedded, and understood the need in all of us to give as well as take.